Valentina Dorme
Gli Squali

Talking about Valentina Dorme is talking about what hurts.

"Gli Squali".

EP of five tracks plus a final recitation from an alien voice. Five punches to the stomach and a stab to the heart. Sometimes you feel like laying a bit of melancholy over sounds that make butterflies in your stomach, or over stories as black as pitch, swayed by strings as swollen as tear ducts. No. None of this is found in Valentina Dorme. "It is not agony... It's just love fading away. It's nothing" (from the fifth track "Leucò").

Truly it's nothing: no sound caresses you here, no melody whispers to you "calm, listen to these terrifying words, but stay calm, I am here", only guitars that cannot weep, angular, irritating guitars that lead nowhere. They do not explode, they do not implode, they do not accompany the monotone voice of darkness of Mario Pigozzo Favero, they do not support the melody, because there is no melody here. The noise? Not even that. And yet they could make great songs! Or maybe not? Musically there's nothing, no references for an impromptu reviewer, it’s an experience to live like a reading, because if it’s true that (only?) the verses matter here, nonetheless they would lose much without the sound that accompanies them. For many, myself included, it's terrible music. But it nails you.

At least in the last album, their (perhaps only) real song "Canzone di Lontananza" and its reprise in glitch mode was surprising; in "Maledetti i Pettirossi" the familiarity of a Gaber cover offered a port; never have Valentina been as raw and bare as here in this "Gli Squali": in "Un Tale Singhiozza" you hear a sampled cry, but it doesn't move you, you are there, terrified, listening to it as if emptied. In "Leucò" that falsetto lifts you, we intuit a possibility, but a tiny voice doubled in the left earphone dissuades you from taking off before you can even try and hurls you to the ground. Listening to "La Mia Unica Attesa," you somehow expect Pigozzo Favero to tear into nonsense, you expect him to shout "Ma vaffanculooooooooo..." like the most inebriated of Piero Ciampi in "Adius." But of course, it doesn't happen: irony is the farthest thing from the world of Valentina Dorme.

Everything is taken terribly seriously, because it's an inner world, not an outer one. Almost absent are references to certain miserablenesses of everyday life that were present in the aforementioned works. Here only the movements of the soul and flesh exist. Swimming like a dolphin remains an illusion. While all around, the sharks swim within hollow veins.

Your music is crap to us, you are only our most miserable mirror, Valentina, I hate you.